I can’t seem to get back everyday words after everything that’s happened the last couple weeks. After losing Grandma Koeller, and facing some lingering demons of my own, the end-of-the-school-year fervor and fuss (K5 graduations, spring concerts, field trips, sports tournaments, etc.) and then the transition to summer fun…it’s all just left me…tired. I have heavy thoughts and words that go with them, but little to offer about book lists or baking projects or summer picnics and popsicles.

I find myself sitting in the truck in the driveway…looking over the fields and animals…and just wanting quiet. Just wanting time. And space. Just wanting to be still for a little while.

It occurs to me that there’s a price to pay for every choice we make–and we don’t know what it is before we make our choices. Or we think we can negotiate it afterwards. Or we refuse to admit that’s what it is.

There’s a price to pay for choosing this life. This homesteading, small farming, country-living, life.

In simple terms, one cost is that we don’t get to go to Disney. {smile}

Another is that we don’t get as much leeway to lie to ourselves. Our weaknesses are written big across the landscape of the farm. Lack of diligence–parasites. Lack of work ethic–weeds. Lack of attention–broken eggs. Lack of discipline–rust. Self-indulgence becomes apparent in every crooked gate, every unfilled hole, every unstained board.

It can be a hard school.

There’s a price to pay for the daily beauty.

Lambs must be harvested to make room for new lambs in the spring. Chickens must be harvested to feed the family over the winter. You have to watch the flowers wither and die away if you want to enjoy the new shoots and blooms that come in the summer.

The farm doesn’t allow you to sift out the good from the bad. The beauty from the ugly. The happy from the tears. Each day rolls into the next and you realize how small, how very small, you are in the midst of the world around you.

Being powerless is a fact. Knowing you are powerless is part of the price you have to pay to have the joy of letting go.

For me, adulthood has utterly disabused of any notion that “that won’t happen to me” or “God wouldn’t do that to me.” I am left with no peace through innocence or naivete. I have only that which comes from faith. And when my faith is small, I find it grows best in the quiet.

“Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.” Henry Ward Beecher